Epifire

Well done on the creases! Only thing I'd do at this point (if you plan on baking it) is to get a fairly dense lowres mesh over that and maybe put some smoothing on your highres reference you've been working on. By smoothing I mean subdivision refinement. You may have to add some various edge loops so that you don't lose the good shapes going on here. But it'll make for some smooth'n snazzy normals when you're done. I'm a boss with baking in XSI but I don't know precisely how that's done in Blender (assuming that's what you're using?).

Yeah man, having previously picked out textures to blend helps a lot, but that would be easy to help out with. Trick that I use is to export any and everything that I can from DR to denote area bounding. Now it's only brushwork, but surrounding rocks and paths (and other stuffs that stick into the ground) with brushwork, make for a very detailed BSP to work from. The tricky thing is how you light it. I could toss something together for you very quickly with the right resources to go off of. It's very helpful if you establish boundaries early on. So as you know where you're sky light based entities can cover. When you get your area planned out and ready, pass me a PM and we'll git down to business.

Well screw trying to mess with flares then, that seems to accomplish the effect I need just fine. Thank you for digging that up! I'm pretty lousy at navigating the pk4s to find stuffs, so I'm rather in the debt of those who can find me valuable information. Now if you ever need a special detail asset for a map, just tell this kid...

I like the shape a lot. If anything I'd just thicken the middle of the blade a little bit. The hilt looks perfect imo. To be more specific my thoughts would be to have it widen right at that sharp curve and then taper off to the end. All while keeping the same overall shape. Also if you want any advice or aid with the texturing feel free to hit me up via PMs.

Oh the player lantern (the one you see for the lantern entity to pickup). I don't think most mappers use that one as it's usually assigned through the mission loadout.

Oh geez, they really need to term that better. It's reasons like this, why I absolutely despise the way the info site was written. The weird thing is I've thrown any kind of geometry at it that I can think of to figure out what this deform flare likes. I'm not logged onto my main desktop right now so I can't take a look at what the console is saying yet. I'd be interested in seeing how the lantern is setup in both mesh and materials. I couldn't find where that stays in the directories though. I know it uses a light amount of flare on it and that's what I want to shoot for.

Kinda just moving the topic of deform flares from the, "what are you working on thread" to here. With Vanished One's material reference I'm able to apply that on a model but the results in-game are confusing. So first the id dev resources say that flares need to utilize quads, but I get an in-game error about it not being triangulated and none of the rest of the mesh renders because of it. Just in general quads wont render at all as far as my tests can gather. But just as well if I run this material on the same patch and have it triangulated I get a non-stop error loop in the console. I guess I'm a little in the dark of how the mesh is supposed to be handled in this instance then?

If you were getting kinda creative with Thieves, you could have a round spinning table for knife throwing. Like those ones that have something or someone tied to it? A bit more grand for what you were thinking maybe, but it could be a fun bit of details for a good laugh.

Primarily I wanted to customize one of the existing glass_warp materials. It needs a bit less translucency and a bit more ambient color to define the shape for the off mode. The on state needs to be able to show the internal arc detail when close and have a kind of yellow glow to the shape. Doesn't the lantern use the deform flare? I was hoping to just reduce the rings back to quads to try that and see. If it didn't have any major impact on performance, that would be perfect for what I need then. A material example is really all I'd need to attempt that with, as I really couldn't find any sufficient usage of it on the idSdk site. You may like what I have in mind coming up. I don't exactly have a full take on a mission to put it into yet, but there's a certain scene I want to script and model out. Without putting out too many details, it'll make great use of sounds and visuals for what I'm currently capable of doing

Two days back I realized I wanted a control system for mappers to use, so I kinda did a thing... The shadow mesh has been optimized and the only thing I'd like to change is to get the glow deformer on the bulb rings. The internal arc loses visibility through the glass warp at a distance. I'm curious as to what other glass shaders are available? I like how this one looks otherwise, I'd just like the bulbs to have a bit of a outline in the final result. The unit consists of four meshes total. The main junction box, and three separate lever/bulb sections for starters. These separate meshes share the same origin as the junction box. So basically all you have to do is position the box, then duplicate it and switch to the desired mesh slot you need the lever to sit in. There's a fourth separate lever mesh to parent to a mover entity, as the actual switch. So with that and on/off skins, it should have everything a mapper needs to add in their own switches for in-game purposes. Also! Unlike the arc transformer, this one has a back panel and isn't limited to being placed against a wall.

I kinda wanna make a fairly expansive outdoor scene to test this in now. The only other thing I wish we could utilize is parallax shaders. That would be extremely handy for extra terrain depth, but I have some other ideas that may help handle that. What's really awesome about this method is that there are really no harsh UV seams anywhere. Like as long as you setup your tiling to really match the playable space, you can also bend and warp the terrain a bit to fit even more. For instance, you could easily setup a brick path and blend it to a thin dirt line. Then you'd use another material that blends from dirt to grass. So theoretically there's no limit to the blending as long as you have additional materials to separate each planned area. There's noticeable tiling as we see, so another one we could use is a separate grass to weeds/shrub (whichever) and intersperse them in patches. One that really intrigues me is being able to not have bland transitions from separate models, such as rocks. I could make patches of rocks, posts, walls or fences that have neatly minded transitions. So instead of props simply clipping into terrain we could see them as something that actually looks like it belongs in the environment.

Well this was worth the bump I think because the results are really promising. I'm not really sure what I did but the big thing is you gotta make sure there's a large light covering the whole thing. Cool thing is there's a red point light showing up fine here too! You can also see that white sheen I was talking about mid way through the path/terrain in the shot below... Now this is an extremely simple setup but I have some really solid ideas on how to. "link" textures together to blend multiple materials on a single mesh. Because as long as the primary texture (white painted) is the same, you can swap the secondary and blend nearly anything as long as you give yourself a boarder to blend your primary textures in first. Dug up an old tutorial on this matter as well that may help others with the initial setup of a terrain mesh... http://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/idtech/vertex-texture-blending-applied-to-models.php Also on a different (more advanced note) I'm beginning to wonder if we can use opacity masks to further condense what areas are shown for the secondary blend. If and this is a big if, we could then use heightmaps to customize where secondary blends occur. Therefore forcing our texture blend to high or low areas. The possibilities, I r excited!

Maybe a bit of tweaking (and maybe a radial glass warp?) for the spotlight. Looks best against blues or whites as I'm trying to de-saturate my stuff more since I realize TDM has a lot of red and yellow lighting. So far I'm content with the color scheme though, what do you guys think?

Airship, I'm kinda curious as it's hard to tell from the angle, but is that an accessible upper balcony for the player in that room? Also +1 to making me look up the definition of anachronistic.

That would be much appreciated! I'll toss the other comparison mesh in for kicks so you can see what a Softimage|XSI exported lwo looks like along side one from blender. Only difference is that the XSI variant isn't painted so it'll come up solid with just the grass texture. All my stuff made in XSI always is required to be re-exported to function correctly in TDM. Sadly I haven't been able to find a fully compatible plugin. But here's the stuff either way! http://www.mediafire.com/download/70dvctv5u5rfvw1 The nice thing is that doing vert painting is super simple to do in Blender. You basically can hotkey "V" with the mesh selected to toggle the paint mode and export your result. Do note that I haven't been able to get any blending to occur without the, "id tech compatible" box checked. EDIT: After doing some extensive visual testing I've uncovered a little more on how this vertex blending reacts under different lighting scenarios. It actually shows up a lot more evenly when correctly in line with a parallel light. Something to note is that it seems to modulate the coverage almost as if it's lighting through the blend maps. For instance, with an unpainted cube you have even coverage as long as the plane is open and visible to the light. But the painted cube only will receive the majority of light on it's closest corner. I'm also seeing some kind of sheen (almost looks specular?) that shows up at various angles. It's almost as if the vertex color values (or shades in this case) have some kind of contribution to the final lighting step. It's confusing as to what exactly is causing this, but I may try several different things with the vertex colors and see what happens.

Yeah I tried that but no effect. I also tried to manually edit the diffuse inputs to make both 50% brighter to remove any kind of multiply darkening effect that may have. Also removed both bump stages completely if it was a strange overlap issue, as well as trying each in the material individually but no change. I'm convinced it may have something to do with my Blender export procedure as I specifically have to check idtech compatible in the export for this blend to even function at all. Should this matter as to what color I use? Because currently it's just b&w.

Oh man, so much information! Reloaddecls is gonna help me out a ton as I've been reloading my client before this point, each time I needed to alter my material. Something I've came back to and had some success with today! Went back to my old material def of the Vertex Color blend and am happy to say I have something a bit more workable now. Getting some of the kinks out, and having to use Blender completely this time for painting the vertexes. Only probs I've got now is that it doesn't seem to light correctly, and I'm feeling it may have something to do with how my material is setup. Otherwise we do have proper blending of diffuse and normals going on here... The same material (without vertex paints) is seen on the right. The bottom half of the left is painted black, to blend a dirt and rocks texture. EDIT: This is what it looks like with the Lantern. I have to stand and cross angles a couple feet back for it to render... If I get close with the lantern I can get it to light at weird angles, but this seems to be, "over-multiplying" somehow. Just much darker and has a hard time lighting and such. Otherwise I'm painting with white and black and it seems to work for the VertexColor / inverseVertexColor lines. Oh and here's the material I'm running it with so far... terrain_blend_001 { surftype15 description "grass" noshadows { blend bumpmap map textures/terrain/generic_grass_001_local VertexColor } { blend diffusemap map textures/terrain/generic_grass_001 VertexColor } // TDM Ambient Method Related { if (global5 == 1) blend add map textures/terrain/generic_grass_001 scale 1,1 red global2 green global3 blue global4 VertexColor } { blend bumpmap map textures/terrain/generic_soil_001_local inverseVertexColor } { blend diffusemap map textures/terrain/generic_soil_001 inverseVertexColor } // TDM Ambient Method Related { if (global5 == 1) blend add map textures/terrain/generic_soil_001 scale 1,1 red global2 green global3 blue global4 inverseVertexColor } }

I think I'm seeing my confusion. The map used for blend add doesn't have to be the diffuse? See I was using the diffuse assuming that had to be layered for it to work.

Yeah, that was the big thing trying to regulate the glow size/intensity. In which case, I'm still slightly foggy as to how I actually setup a material/parent entity relation. I was assuming this was if the mesh was defined as an entity, therefore anything contained in it's definitions could be directed accordingly. In short, I'm using a speaker placed by the prop but I'm not understanding how I get a material within a separate entity to respond to the sound emitted from a different source. Oh I have nothing against blend add, I was just under the impression that I couldn't produce a transparent gradient with it. I mean currently my arc bolt is just a hard edged arc, even though the alpha has a soft edge. So what I'm gathering is you can use another image as a mask to the blend add? This shader prog you speak of, it interests me.

Tried jumbling all of that around. Usually it either was ineffective at altering the scroll state or I'd break the material instead. I don't want to have to do the flip workaround (as it seems kinda shoddy) but it really does do the job if all else fails. I may have to look into that more here on my day off. While I'm still on the subject one other thing has been sticking out while I was doing this. I wanted to get some kind of flare/bloom effect but realized that the alpha for masking is hard edged. Now if I gather correctly, transparency just measures across the whole texture (not taking alpha gradients into account)? Because I wanted to get some kind of flaring effect. I know we also have this light bloom that works on quads but that establishes itself based off the geometry, not the texture I think. Because my initial thought was to pair that onto a sprite (which essentially would be perfect). But the sprite deformer works off of deforming tris, so I think that's invalid when paired with flare. Note when I say sprites, I mean on the pylons not the actual electrical arc. More the contact points. Some annoying constraints but I'm curious as to what other people use for glow methods, besides blend add. It would be wonderful if there could be an additional option to use within blend modes, but I doubt that's no easy feat to accomplish. Because then bloom wouldn't really need to be faked if it could be added dynamically through the material stage.

I'll pack you the current version of it sir!

Last bit to add, as I feel more would be overdoing it (at least for the moment)... All I really want to do after that is get the last sound I need (for the arc) and tie that into a light flicker to accompany the unit. Otherwise the idle track is all I have, as you can kinda hear it in the background. Idle is meant for a low power state or, "standby" to kinda help guide the player if it's a unit that can be activated. I think I may end up just separating the crank lever so people can make use of that with DR as they feel fit. Either way the major stuff is done, so I'm a happy camper. Now where's that spotlight I was working on...

I'm copying loads of material info into my, "Cool Copied Shaders" folder for when I get to use this! I kinda feel like a kid in a candy shop when people give me cool materials. One that's bugging me is I've gotten my scroll texture to work in-game but I can't figure for the life of me how to use horizontal scroll. Now I've jumbled this scroll around with different brackets, numbers and stuff I could think of (fore and aft to the time* function) with no effect. Otherwise I just get a vertical scroll instead. Although it still looks pretty cool, it's not what I'm going for since there's some noticeable clipping... noshadows nonsolid twosided { blend diffusemap map models/darkmod/props/textures/arcBolt_card alphatest 0.5 scroll 0, (time * 1) } { blend add map models/darkmod/props/textures/arcBolt_card rgb .8 scroll 0, (time * 1) } Probably simple fix I'm needing but anything else I try and add before (time * 1) only breaks the material, or does nothing. Otherwise all I want to do after this is get two sprites with some flare at each pylon to blend the start/end a little more. If it's anything to note, they should always render in front of the other alpha planes (to cover the arc bolts). So isn't there a material line to force that in the alpha sorting? EDIT: Still curious about the alpha sorting and sprite stuff, but I fixed the scrolling... well sorta. I figured the thing wanted to vertically scroll instead so I just put a 90 degree flip on my UVs and texture and boom, it works perfectly now. I think adding more stuff might be overkill so for now I think I'm gonna call that good with the arc. I mean most arc bolts I've looked up references on don't have this bloom effect at the pylon source anyway, so it doesn't really pertain to realism either. Additional spark effects would be pretty but I think they would only fit for a special overload mode. Because really unless the unit is damage, it shouldn't spark if working properly right? Either way some interesting thoughts, but maybe for another time. Only other thing I thought would be cool is a working lever. But I figure some kind of mover parent from within DR could handle a separate lever mesh for now. Epi says no to anims right now.